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archives | newquaker.comSaturday, May 31, 2003
Could it be true that the US is a nation of arrogant war enthusiasts who are so distant from the reality of warfare that our modern military campaigns are like so many TV miniseries? And it's getting difficult to dissent from the bellicose intentions of our government: dissidents get shouted off the stage, if they get a chance to speak at all.
That's what happened to Michael Moore at the Academy Awards and in April to Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, whose appearance at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown was canceled because of their criticism of the US-led incursion in Iraq.
Then it happened again on May 17—this time to veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges, who was in Illinois delivering the commencement address at Rockford College. The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter was booed, shouted at, menaced, and had his microphone disconnected twice, despite the college president's intermittent plea for tolerance from the surly audience, some of whom turned their backs on Hedges as he spoke. Hedges, author of the celebrated book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Public Affairs, 2002; ISBN 1-58648-049-9), managed to finish his abbreviated speech and was escorted from the commencement by campus security.
Read the full text of his commencement address. Then mourn the loss of honesty in our quest to know the urgency for the Bush Administration's preemptive assault on Iraq. Apparently, while planning the military campaign there, our government knew there were no "Weapons of Mass Destruction" left in that country.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 2:16 AM
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Israel according to the flesh. It is common knowledge that the Bush Administration is joined at the hip with a curious group of Christians who espouse a weird pseudo-messianic theological perspective. I guess I don't care so much that the President has a leaning one way or another toward a particular religious view: after all, he's human and he's an American. But we all should be alarmed when the religious view itself starts to direct federal policy—especially when the theological view being espoused is utterly, if not dangerously, false.
Witness Israel and a strange group of people called Christian Zionists. Because modern Israelis have adopted the word "Israel," this is supposed to make us all think that this is the same historical body that Moses wandered in the desert with for 40 years: the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Well, yes and no—and this is important.
To be Jewish, to be numbered among the historical body of Israel, it is not enough merely that your mother was Jewish (which is one of the tests for "Jewishness" used by the modern Israelis). We should remember, after all, that David's great-grandmother, Ruth, ancestress of Jesus, was a Moabitess. As Paul says, "not all who are descended from Israel are Israel" [Rom 9:6]. The "natural children" do not make up Israel—instead, "it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring" [Rom 9:8].
Israel-the-state was a 19th-century idea that was eventually brought into being in 1948 through tireless efforts of predominantly nonobservant Jews who trace their ancestry not by faith in Torah or God, but rather along Semitic or cultural lines. There was great opposition from the Jewish Orthodoxy toward the establishment of Israel as a nation, and for the very reason why we should discount it from Christian orthodoxy: it rests on sandy Biblical foundations. It is one thing to believe in the duty of every faithful believer to settle in the Holy Land (mitzvah yishuv eretz yisrael) and another thing entirely to believe that it is okay to take back land that is no longer yours to have.
God gave Canaan to the children of Israel and in doing so fulfilled all of his promises [Josh 21:43-45]. At the time of Solomon it is clear that the house of Israel possessed all of Canaan [1 Kings 4:21-24, 2 Chron 9:26; see Gen 15:18-19]. But this possession was not immutable, but actually conditional. Before they crossed the Jordan into Canaan, Moses made it clear to his people that their continued possession would depend on their faithfulness to God and their obedience to God's commandments [see Deut 28:15-68, 29:22-28, 30:17-18]. Jews have no immutable right to possession of historical Canaan.
Christian Zionists err in believing that they are doing God's work in the modern State of Israel. Only Christ and his people are the true children of Israel. Israel is a spiritual body and the natural Israelites actually have no standing before God. Modern Israel is solely a natural, political creation of man.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 12:38 AM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
